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You'd think after getting their asses (futures) handed to them (and not lovingly), people would start paying attention to what is and has been going on since the Rayguns invaded the U.S. in the 80's.
Ah. But no. It's too unpleasant, so, can we discuss the fraudulent Tea Partiers some more? Cause they're really "just folks." And didn't mean any harm, of course.
Please?
As time goes on and money is poured in larger and larger amounts into the political process ("Thank you, Supreme Court's Citizens United fraud judgment of last term!"), surely the people paying their share of the bills must be asking themselves at some point cui bono (to whose benefit) constantly.
There are a couple of reporters who have tried to get the facts out for a very long time. Wonder if anyone will now begin to put two and two together and start to figure this out?
Much more to understand here.Almost 50 years ago, New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison puzzled over what was visible, what was not, and what it meant.
“I knew by now that when a group of individuals gravitated towards one another for no apparent reason," he wrote, in On the Trail of the Assassins.
"Or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field…Or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times…As often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.”
It made sense then. It makes sense today.
"I have known since 2004, (I reported it in my book Welcome to Terrorland) that when Mohamed Atta arrived at Huffman Aviation, a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to the flight school’s owner, Wally Hilliard, was flying weekly drug flights — a total of 39 — to Venezuela and back,” says Hopsicker."THAT Company? Yep. That Company."
"Then, three weeks after Atta’s arrival, Hilliard’s Lear was seized by DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport who found 43 lbs. of heroin onboard. According to the Orlando Sentinel, it was a Central Florida record."
After the 9/11 killed almost 3000 people, one would think that this incriminating fact alone would be enough to spark a Watergate-style Congressional Inquiry. Alas, the connection between Atta's arrival and Hilliard's drug trafficking has never been remarked on officially.
Today, that seems to have been a case of the less said the better.
The Company’s contingent at the Venice Airport numbered as many as a dozen pilots and associates, and was led by a mysterious Cuban exile, Mario Silverio Villamia, using the alias Frank Guzman, who was named along with Jack Ruby in a 1964 FBI document to the Warren Commission.
Federal prosecutors said The Company ( the subject of Sally Denton’s excellent The Bluegrass Conspiracy, which first raised pointed questions about the involvement of the CIA with the group) was composed of three hundred or so Special Force’s veterans, former military intelligence officers, ex-DEA Agents, policemen, and even judges.
Another lesson is available from Global Research where we learn that (emphasis marks added - Ed.):
Click this Global Research link to read the rest of this most informative essay.By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is as if the White House and Congress had legitimized the Ku Klux Klan to operate globally. That's because the CIA today resembles nothing so much as the "Invisible Empire" of the KKK that once spread terror across the South and Midwest. Fiery crosses aside, this is what the CIA is doing globally. The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes.
By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution. What's more, the "Agency," as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
And speaking about cashing in on those new pots of gold (bet you thought they were already threadbare!):
Once upon a time there was man named Milton Bearden, commonly referred to as Milt. He spent his early years in the state of Washington where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. After a few years with the US Air Force he joined the CIA in 1964.
Milt was CIA’s chosen man for their operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, from 1986 to 1989, when our country was supporting the Mujahideen, he was one of their main men on the ground, working with this coalition of the Taliban, the Saudis and their main man Bin Laden, and the Pakistani ISI. The Director of the CIA, William Casey, was the one who appointed Milt Bearden for this task. Here is Milt’s own words describing his importance in a not very unusual ex-CIA conceited manner:
. . . Milt’s cushy CIA retirement and all those glowing medals must not have been enough, for he then engaged in frenzied marketing and self promotion to get himself entrenched in almost all major US networks and newspapers as a consultant, writer, advisor, and of course as a trusted source – a CIA source to provide quotes and information for scripts at the snap of a finger. He coauthored a book with New York Times reporter James Risen called State of War. Whether this kind of business arrangement, where a commonly used source partners up with a reporter, presents a conflict of interest or even could be called incestuous, is everyone else’s call.
Most interestingly Mr. Bearden seemed to have lured in the American mainstream media by presenting himself as an outspoken critique of the Bush White House Intelligence policies after the September 11 terrorists’ attack. He suddenly became a major spokesperson on ‘how we created this monster called Osama Bin Laden,’ and the nasty radical Taliban. And the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of him. Ironically, he happened to be the man after William Casey and Neocons’ Jeane Kirkpatrick’s own hearts in creating the Bin Laden monster, bolstering the radical Taliban brand of Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and kosherizing all dirty deeds as means to justify the end(s). He didn’t get those medals or promotions for nothing!
. . . Our General Wardak disappeared from the Afghan scene at the beginning of the civil war in the 1990s. He brought his family to the United States where he settled comfortably with enough wealth from undetermined sources, and he enrolled his son, Hamed, in Georgetown University.
. . . The Karzai brothers took a great interest in Wardak Junior, and he enjoyed the benefits of the Karzais’ flashy and high-flying friends. After the September 11 Terror Attacks, the Karzais made Hamed the Vice President of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, which was founded by Mahmood Karzai. As I mentioned briefly in my piece, our Neocon Ex-Congressman Don Ritter happens to be the co-founder of this organization. Hamed was also appointed to an advisor’s post with President Karzai’s first Finance Minister, Ashraf Ghani. No small accomplishment for the barely 30 year old Hamed!
. . . Hamed Wardak’s most productive venture in tapping into the US Defense Sector Pot(s) of Gold began with joining a Washington DC contracting firm, Technologists Inc., founded by Aziz Azimi, who happened to be a very close buddy of Qayum Karzai. Here is a further detail on this by e-Ariana:
“Hamed Wardak’s new alliances proved extraordinarily advantageous as George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” particularly with Khalilzad and Strmecki enjoying direct access to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office.”
Do you want to check out the kind of contracts, the kind of millions, we are talking about with Technologists Inc.? Here is one for you:
Technologists, Inc., Rosslyn, Va., was awarded on Jan. 5, 2009, a $96,090,519 firm fixed price contract for the construction of an Afghanistan National Police National Training Center. Work will be performed in Maydan Wardak, Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by Mar. 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Web bids were solicited on Oct. 1, 2008, and 13 bids were received. U.S. Army Engineer District, Afghanistan, is the contracting activity (W917PM-09-C-0005).
That’s right. Just one of these contracts is worth nearly $100 million for connected Afghan carpetbaggers cashing in on wars suffered by ordinary American tax payers and US soldiers.
And just recently that center right (but sometimes a nudge farther left) Huffington Post source runs a story that makes you finally say, "Aha!" As if it were all an innocent mistake.
It is a well-known fact in Washington that then Vice President Cheney proudly micro-managed all things Gitmo (authorizing torture and determining detainee releases). And as he continues his hyper-partisan attacks on President Obama and the Democratic Party let it be clearly understood that Al Qaeda's resurgence in Yemen can, in no small part, be traced back to Dick Cheney himself.
In 2007, then Vice President Dick Cheney personally authorized the release of 11 Saudis from Guantanamo Bay, who then passed through a leaky Saudi halfway house terrorist rehabilitation program to rejoin Al Qaeda. Two of the 11 former detainees took the express jihadi underground railroad to rejoin Al Qaeda in Yemen.
In February, 2009, the New York Times reported that U.S. counterterrorism officials confirmed that one of the Cheney repats was Said Al-Shihri, who became the deputy leader of the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, and that he was suspected of being involved in a deadly attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen in 2007. Shortly after the attack, Shihri appeared in an Al Sahab Al Qaeda video production along with another Cheney repat identified as Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, who also rejoined Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Based on a comprehensive review by the Defense Intelligence Agency 14% of the 530 Gitmo detainees released through Cheney's direct approval (74 to be exact) have either been identified as reengaging in terrorism or suspected of doing so.
So, let me get this straight. Cheney authorized the release of unrepentant hardened terrorists to his Saudi friends. Having cut their shackles from the Saudis, these escapees are now training and recruiting the likes of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and threatening to attack the U.S. embassy in Yemen, and Cheney has the chutzpah to accuse Democrats of being soft on terrorism!
At best, Cheney's 2007 authorization to transfer Gitmo detainees to Saudi Arabia represented a fawning leap of blind faith in Saudi assurances that these detainees were perfect guinea pigs for an unproven terror rehab program and would no longer pose a threat to them or to us. However, the alarming recidivism rate has had dire and direct consequences on American security.
At worst, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its subchapter in Yemen should dispatch to Cheney a warm jihadi thank you note for playing such a direct role in their reconstitution, their resurgence, and their increasing danger to the U.S. homeland and our diplomats in Yemen.
Ordinarily, had Cheney kept reasonably quiet like his former boss instead of pretentiously anointing himself the sole defender of America's safety and security (as if every decision he made kept America safe), his decision to authorize the release of Al Qaeda operatives now back in the fight against the U.S. in Yemen and elsewhere would not have warranted a revisit - just another footnote in the history of Cheney's imperfect logic where he is often wrong, but never in doubt.
However, in view of Cheney's willfully inaccurate partisan attacks he deserves to now be held accountable for the Yemeni Al Qaeda terror sanctuary he helped man through his own micromanagement of Gitmo detainees and misguided deference to his Halliburton buddies in Saudi Arabia. As a result, America is a whole lot less safe because of Mr. Cheney's own decisions.
Read on here.
Joe Bageant has always had the true and droll retort to BS. Even when it was four years early. He comments on the secret (only from you) of your unending drudgery for so little that enriches those above, why the stock market numbers are manipulated to entrance the circus goers, as well as the facts informing those "boring" Greenspan speeches and why they were supposed to be. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
Muffled noises from the ranks of the babbling paranoid
December 6, 2006
It's hard as hell to keep conspiracy theories out of one's mind these days. And I'm not talking about "Who really brought down the Twin Towers? or the "Are Zionists behind the Iraq War?" kind of stuff. The booger stalking my ragged old mind these days puts both of those in the shade. And it runs like this:
Is the consumerist totalization of this country and the world really a conscious plot by a handful of powerful corporate and financial masters?If we answer "yes" we find ourselves trundled off toward the babbling ranks of the paranoid. Still though, it's easy enough to name those who would piss themselves with joy over the prospect of a One World corporate state, with billions of people begging to work for their 1,500 calories a day and an xBox chip in their necks. It's too bad our news media quit hunting with live ammo decades ago, leaving us with no one to track the activities and progress of what sure as hell seem to be global elites, judging from the financial spoor we find along every pathway of modern life.
In our saner moments we can also see that it does not take dark super-centralized plotting to pull off what appears to have been accomplished. Even without working in overt concert, a few thousand of dedicated individual corporate and financial interests can constitute a unified pathogenic whole, much the same as individual cells create a viable dominant colony of malignant organisms - malignant simply by their anti-human, anti-societal nature. We don't see GM, Halliburton, Burger King and CitiBank lobbying the state for universal health or clean rivers, do we? But mention unions or living wages, and the financial colony within our national Petri dish shape shifts into a Gila monster and squirts venom on the idea and shits money all over Capitol Hill. I looked at all this as coincidence for years until the proposition finally strained credulity so much that I threw in the towel and said, "Fuck it. There is only so much coincidence to go around in this world."Put another way, the global decision makers, international planners, financial institutions, political parties, media conglomerates, corporations, banks, a hegemonic, accumulative bloc working in concert to coordinate the extraction of wealth from first and third world alike. A series of privately held international institutions to which and from which money can be moved to leverage nations and populations according to their needs is probably gonna do just that because they can. National territory doesn't mean shit to such people, and those who govern said territory mean even less, except to the extent they can obstruct or incite resistance. People like Castro and Chavez. But even they are they are just the thorn in the lion's paw. Consider this: The war in Iraq has been immensely profitable for the people who make weapons and for the contractors who supposedly rebuild what the weapons destroy. They profit in either case. And the longer war goes on the more they will make.
Meanwhile, the money for both is obtained through extraction practiced upon the world's laboring poor. But the big money, the "juice" as street people used to say, comes from squeezing the orange of American society for more work, more production and tax money. Some of us older oranges are feeling pretty wrung out these days and are getting hard as hell to get along with. Yet, the squeeze doesn't seem to bother most Americans at all.
The pressure has been so great and so constant that no one any longer feels it. It has become so pervasive as to be incomprehensible to ordinary people. For example, seventy cents of every income-tax dollar goes to pay for past, present, and future wars.
Education gets two cents. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, the cost of military aircraft parts and ammunition kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined federal spending on pollution control, conservation, community development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation all put together. And the US Navy spends more money in its never ending development of a submarine rescue vehicle than is spent for public libraries, occupational safety, and daycare centers combined.
Collectively, these financial super-elites, who either do or do not exist, must be at least somewhat aware that they are managing the world. Otherwise, why would we have Davos conferences and such? Global financial conferences where the likes of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry are merely the entertainment, mere proof of the attendants' prestige?
Can it be true that the world's real players practically yawned at Alan Greenspan's cryptic little speeches while waiting for the backstage action with the real movers and shakers from Goldman, Citibank and others, none of whom we have ever heard of but never the less are said to account for the drop in gas prices in the U.S. just prior to the 2006 mid-term elections?
Word has it that they changed the index last July so oil futures holders would be forced to dump in October and November, creating a mild glut during the elections. If that is true, then we can probably thank them for that Dow 12,000 last month too.
Meanwhile, back in Camp Davos, the lustful, pathologically approval seeking, bright student teddy bear from Hope, Arkansas expounds and entertains the new global elites. And everyone has Beluga caviar and chopped hardboiled quail eggs afterward, even as more than one billion people live on less than one dollar a day.
"And have you tried the unborn calf veal poached in Peruvian sheep's milk at the Swiss bank suite? It's to die for!" Nobody is remotely worried about blowback from that billion people eating moldy cassava or rat urine polluted rice, because poverty, well, poverty is not threat, is it? Just a source of cheaper labor. "Now, about the oil crude taps and NYMEX . . . "
Personally, I've decided they are real and that they constitute an unseen class, and that they are mid-stage in becoming the most powerful class the earth has ever seen. One that American politicians not only refuse to publicly acknowledge, but when pressed, flatly swear does not exist.
Show me the Republican or Democratic leader who says, "Politics is economics by other means, and our own Federal Reserve Bank is a privately held institution, not a governmental one, and is an interlocking part of the global financial network which owes allegiance to no country or ordinary citizens, regardless of nationality."
Or, "My corporate campaign contributions come from people whose every action is directed at extracting two things from you, my dear voter: Your money and the cheapest possible labor you can be driven to provide. The absolute cheapest possible payment to you for the hours of your life consumed by work, which, depending upon the degree of your delusion, is called either a job or an exciting career."
No American politician is going to admit that. You must go to Venezuela or the smoldering dumps of Manilla or fields of Chiapas to hear that sort of truth. Admittedly, there is at least some reason for fear among these elites. The US economy, the real material economy, is dreadfully weak, having been so gutted by parasitic speculation. The only source of strength left here is the military, which is currently at play in an effort to gain control over the world's energy supply, and make damned sure no one gets any funny ideas about using anything but dollars in trading oil.
But the real players say, "Well then, let the Americans keep it if they can! If the U.S. loses, then someone else wins. No matter. We can leverage our position from any emerging market point on the globe. And doesn't China look like a real comer, old boy!
History is long. The Chinese understand that." Thus we find the Chinese creating joint American holding companies to buy up commercial US real estate at bottom dollar after the crash. At some future point it could neatly offset their current loans to US for more consumption of Chinese goods. And if the Americans get too pissy, the Chinese can always turn off the money spigot.
On the other hand, this monstrous class of parasites has not yet won over the entire world. America seems to be their only complete victory, and that one will hold only as long as superheated consumption can be sustained. They have only been at it for maybe forty years, and are still pouring the foundation for the global gulag, setting the rules as they go. And they are hitting at least a few speed bumps:
"Why is Castro still stinking up the joint, fer godzsake? And now we've got that friggin mexi-nigger dwarf Evo Morales in his goddamned stinky little dime store sweater strutting around like he was president or something. And why inna hell hasn't somebody smoked these bastards? Doesn't the CIA do anything for their paychecks anymore?"
Probably not. Last we heard the CIA was sidelined, sent to the benches until they come up with those goddamned weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, a Chinese economist calculates the US trade deficit. A Swisse Bank exec orders another bottle of wine, and a Shia youth receives instruction in how to blow up an oil pipeline. Only the Chinaman and the bank exec are smiling.
And we have our proof now, don't we?
And would anything help to change what we have allowed to be sold to us everyday as "the snooze?"
Well, how about this? (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
Coverage of foreign news has declined by 40% over the past three decades – why?
November 02, 2010 "The Guardian" -- In September 1979, the Daily Mirror broke the story of the killing fields of Cambodia to the world. Across a dozen pages, the paper detailed the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
"An incredible human disaster has happened in Cambodia," John Pilger wrote on the front page beneath a photograph of three human skulls. "Perhaps more than 2 million people – a third of the population – have been killed by a fanatical regime."
In April 2010, the day of the party leaders' foreign policy TV election debate, Britain's two biggest-selling dailies, the Sun and Daily Mail, published a total of three international news stories, adding up to 257 words. One of these was a photo-story about Michelle Obama showing off her biceps to a class of schoolchildren.
Over the past 30 years, our national papers have mushroomed in size. The Guardian has gone from under 30 pages a day to over 100; the Mirror from just over 30 pages to more than 70. Yet, over the same period, international coverage has plummeted, both in terms of the total number of foreign news stories, and as a proportion of the paper as a whole.
In a typical working week in 1979, four papers – the Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Guardian – would together publish 500 foreign news stories, or about 100 a day. By 2009, this had fallen to 300, or 60 a day: a 40% drop. Given the growth in the papers' size this represents a fall from 20% of the paper filled with international news 30 years ago, to 11% now.
These are some of the findings of a report just published by the Media Standards Trust – Shrinking World: The Decline of International Reporting in the British Press. It compares the international coverage of these four papers in an average week in 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009.
Not only does it find that the amount of foreign news has gone down, but that it now rarely makes it into the first 10 pages. In the broadsheets, such coverage is almost entirely confined to the international section, deep within the paper. In the tabloids, it is sporadic and tends to involve celebrities, Brits on holiday, or the weird and wacky.
You could say this was just a reflection of cost-cutting across the news industry. Foreign coverage is expensive, even in these days of cheap flights, mobile smartphones and instant publishing. But, if you talk to foreign correspondents, it seems that newspapers have lost confidence in the role it plays. Is foreign news something people expect to see but do not really read? Does it enhance the status of the brand or is it an unnecessary luxury? Does having someone on the ground make that much difference, as opposed to flying someone in when a story breaks?
A lack of money and confidence has led to a lack of commitment. And, as with other areas of news, such as court reporting, this is leading to a downward spiral in which less international news means less interest in it, leading to less coverage and so on. Yet this reduction of international news seems at odds with the increasing globalisation of our lives – and the growing relevance of foreign stories. There were 45.5m visits abroad by Britons in 2008, as against 7.7m in 1971. Five million Britons live overseas.
It also suggests a lack of imagination. There is now an unparalleled opportunity to gather, filter and distribute foreign news in different ways, tapping into sources on the ground. Organisations such as Global Voices Online and Demotix provide a means of access to thousands of citizen photographers and bloggers whose voices would previously not have been heard. Yet even with big international stories that cry out for innovative reporting (such as the Chilean miners), most legacy news organisations have failed to innovate.
The golden age of foreign correspondents may have gone (if it ever existed), but the need for someone to report on, filter and make sense of the world is greater than it has ever been. Mainstream news organisations are still in a strong position to do this.The findings of this report indicate, though, that many are shying away from the challenge. If the decline continues, and news organisations withdraw still further from original foreign reporting, we will all lose out.
(Shrinking World: The Decline of International Reporting in the British Press is published by the Media Standards Trust and can be read at mediastandardstrust.org.)
Shrinking world of serfs.
Thanks for reading! Suzan ___________
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